Prince, Little Red Corvette

 

I guess I should've known
By the way you parked your car sideways
That it wouldn't last
See, you're the kinda person that believes in makin' out once
Love 'em and leave 'em fast

 

When I e-mailed those song words to an eminent lady not long after Prince died, it was only because I thought they were great words, we had been exchanging thoughts on the great man's premature demise, she had e-mailed me first, the correspondance didn't have much further to go and I didn't hear back from her.

It took me a few days before I thought, OMG, she must have known, surely, that I was only citing great writing. The trouble with Prince is that there's not much of him you can quote without it being overloaded, drenched in the sort of need that could easily lead to depravity.

If I'd been born ten years earlier, I would not have been able to see beyond the Beatles. Born when I was, and having 1971 as the annus mirabilis, it is Marc Bolan and David Bowie that represent an attitude in 'rock' and 'pop' music that is in the blood and can only be bettered by the Motown Hit Factory. But if I'd been born ten years later, it would have been Prince.

He was a bit more than a year older than me and thus one of a generation of overwhelmingly gifted artists that also included Michael Jackson and Morrissey.

You had to go out and buy the 12-inch Little Red Corvette c/w 1999 and you had to have the Purple Rain album. Other musicians might have played all the instruments and done everything on their records but none of them did it as well as this. I'm still not ashamed of having once nominated Marc Bolan as 'best guitarist' - I didn't really know - but I understand that later, when asked, Eric Clapton said it was Prince and so at least he got that right.

It's Little Red Corvette we have here because it was seminal, important. It's not as if the back catalogue doesn't have so many others to offer. MOJO magazine eventually stopped asking their star interviewees what they thought of Bob Dylan and instead asked what they had to say about Prince.

I slightly 'missed the boat' by being a fraction too old to stay interested in everything he did but the short list of pop geniuses who did most of it all by themselves begins with him. It's not always advisable, it's not always possible but, if you are perfectly capable, it's a good idea.   

'Romanticisim' first draft

Not much is of more interest to me than finding three pages of Rosemary Tonks's journal on the website of Newcastle University library, seeing some of the workings of Sean O'Brien poems, where he puts the stress marks in to prove to himself he was within the parameters of iambic pentameter, or such books as Trevor Tolley's Larkin at Work, in which he makes his way through Larkin's notebooks fasitidiously uncovering the process by which the likes of Church Going and The Whitsun Weddings were arrived at.

Not always easily, it seems.

I don't mind how hard Larkin, Rosemary and Sean worked at their poems but I do have doubts about poets I have less respect for putting in painstaking work to make them look as if they arrived in a glorious blast of inspiration. Dylan Thomas is one, who Caitlin was recently on telly again saying he said could spend all day putting in or taking out a word from a line. 

I had thought that was a joke Oscar made about his extreme aestheticism but, no, it's what Dylan actually did. 

Similarly, Allen Ginsberg, apparently, maybe, reportedly, spent a lot of time making Howl look as if it was a spontaneous outburst. It either was or it wasn't. If it was, I'm bored by it; if it wasn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

I would luv it, luv it, in the words of Kevin Keegan, if I could spend weeks, months or even years making a poem better and better until it was as good as it could be. But, when would I know.

For my purposes - and my purposes are the only purposes there are- a poem can look good enough within hours, if not minutes, but certainly within a day or two. Once I like what they look like, they are done.

Romanticism was first of all a few ideas for lines written on the back of my printed-off train ticket to Netley. I did a bit more on Netley Station waiting for the train, had the line endings in before I got home, typed it up and, very unusually for me, took the advice of a friend who questioned,

gorgeous/ with tuberculosis

 

I had thought that was brilliant at first but had to change it. It became restless. I found a better title. It underwent some minor surgery. I abandoned any attempt at a rhyme scheme early doors and then sacrificed any attempt at metrics or syllable count in favour of a music of its own it might have anyway.

 

It's not obvious that any university's library is going to want to blow the very slightest part of their budget on bidding for evidence of how I wrote poems and neither would I. So, here it is anyway.

Some scribble on the reverse side of a train ticket, not wanting to waste paper, becomes a poem that does all a poem had to do. It made its author happy to have written it.     

Miriam Kramer & Nicholas Durcan

Miriam Kramer & Nicholas Durcan, Chichester Cathedral, Sept 6

Summer is a fine thing in fiction, poems or in Vivaldi but for me it need not stand upon the order of its going. The first signs of autumn are most welcome, the drop in temperature, the nights drawing in and, not least, the return of the lunchtime concert season at Chichester, Portsmouth and other such admirable places nearby. There are plenty in the diary from now until the end of November and I'll be trying to find appropriate things to say about them here while the limited stock of language can do any justice to them. I wouldn't be so bold as to call them 'reviews' but maybe 'some sentences arising'. Attending and listening is only half a job. Having some response makes it more complete. To misquote Socrates, the unexamined performance is less worth hearing.  

Miriam Kramer and Nicholas Durcan set the new season in motion in fine style with a glittering dash through their arrangement of The Carnival of the Animals, reducing the Saint-Saëns to ten minutes but still including a few little surprises along the way before a bravura finish.

Schubert's Fantasia, D.940, was contrastingly crepuscular, showing off another aspect of Miriam's tremendous technique. Robert Schumann's Fantasiestücke, Op.73, began in a similar mood but moved through the gears, via some interplay between piano and violin, on its way to a 'fiery' ending. How much time a musician or sportsperson seems to have is an indicator of talent to spare but not all violinists have so much time to spare that they can turn the page of the pianist's music for them.

It wouldn't be sensible, or possible, to pick a highlight from the programme, not with an arrangement of the Brief Encounter music - Rachmanninov Piano Concerto no. 2, slow movement- here entitled Preghiera (Prayer) which could have built to another big finish but decided not to and then more Saint-Saëns with Danse Macabre and all its ghostly effects, including the 'ricochet' bouncing of the bow on the violin strings. But also, I thought, some traces of baroque stylings in the violin. A hint of Vivaldi or a Bach partita. To find such a lucky guess confirmed by Miriam saying she plays Bach, who is her favourite composer (which is the right answer), makes me wonder if I could have a future in this job but I dare say I'll get it wrong as often as I'll get it right. She is the focus of attention in these pieces but I suspect Nicholas is doing plenty and it's a duo act and not a soloist with her accompanist.

It's possible that after the summer drought, of local live music as well as water, the first refreshing splash seems so great that it is more gratefully appreciated than usual. I guess so but, on the other hand, I doubt it. Miriam and Nicholas would be a tremendous show whenever you saw them. And they were an excellent way to get back into the happy routine.

The Beatles - If I Fell

 The Beatles were over-rated. To say as much in an age where blasphemy might not be an offence in itself but has been replaced by 'cancel culture' anyway might be taking a chance but idolatry gets out of hand whether it's applied to Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, Mozart or Bach. And Tamla Motown made consistently better records than the Beatles did, as they should have. There were more of them.

I was a fraction too young to be actually there at the time but, thanks to my parents doing their best for me, I had Beatles wallpaper on my bedroom wall at the age of 5, a framed picture of them by my bed, a plastic guitar on which to do 'yeah, yeah, yeah' and a metal drum-kit on which to be Ringo. George, the thoughtful, possibly the most sensitive and the youngest one was the only one I never thought was me.

The likes of She Loves You, I Wanna Hold Your Hand or Please, Please Me were a 'big bang' that no new thing in pop music before or after could equal. The impact of any would-be revolution since, even including the Sex Pistols, has arrived with diminishing returns.

Great artists will improve, and so they did, arriving at Revolver and Rubber Soul, but it might also be true that becoming too famous while you're still at it makes you feel a bit too god-like, as if your every thought was a gift you had a duty to pass on to your worshippers.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is not, as it is so often listed, the best pop album ever made. To misquote John Lennon on the subject of Ringo, if he ever said it, it's not the Best Album Ever, it's not even the Best Album by the Beatles. 

Success has its end in its own beginning and the Beatles spent nearly as much time 'making it' in Hamburg and the Cavern as they did at the top of the world, by all means more important to a lot of people than Jesus, before imploding, but it's not easy being that big. I don't think it was Yoko's fault- people always need somebody else to blame- and I don't think it was Paul's fault. He would probably have carried on and we would have been saved from Wings. It was John's fault, always the difficult one, the not quite as talented one, even if his solo efforts, not necessarily including Imagine, might outweigh Paul's.

But nothing lasts forever and a better reason for finishing in 1970 was that there wasn't much left for them to do. Motown had hit records before they did, and after, but whether it's the money that confuses them, the egos involved or simply that you've done as much as you could have, there might not have been much more to come.

There are any number of highlights. To ascertain the strength in depth of artists like Lennon-McCartney, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Smkoey Robinson, Carole King or Stephin Merritt, you see what no. 30 is in a list of their best records and see how good that is. The Beatles could easily be Top 5 at that but, in a competitive heat heat for no. 1 involving  I Should Have Known Better, Yesterday and She's Leaving Home as well as those early classics and a couple of cover versions, Baby, it's this. 

    You can see where Doherty and Barat got the idea of singing at the same microphone, loving each other and falling out, from.

 

Black Uhuru - Leaving to Zion

 The pop music book is now filed under 'Wake Up, Maggie'. I can't remember re-titling it as that, or why. It's still called 'Playlist', I think. But needs must we press on or else I'll forget I'm doing it.

There wasn't any question that I had to be at the Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, on Sept 5th, 2022 to see Black Uhuru on their 50th Anniversary Tour having seen them in Brighton 42 years earlier. It was not to be, though, and only provided at least a hat-trick of reasons for not seeing gigs I should have. I went to Portsmouth Guildhall the night after the Jesus & Mary Chain were on and didn't think Gary Numan was any sort of compensation and I misguidedly turned down an invitation to see The Libertines in their early years, also at the Wedgewood Rooms, on the grounds that I thought Pete Doherty was 'a waste of space'. I've always been grateful to be proved wrong.

I was interested to see the lady on the poster and assumed it was Puma 42 years older but was devastasted to find she had died, aged 36, in 1990. I must try to keep up. But Black Uhuru had been an essential part of the reggae boom in the UK in the late 70's and into the 80's with their Red album and the Black Uhuru LP with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner that I suddenly had another bout of 'seller's remorse' when I realized it had gone, along with all the other pop vinyl, and that no amount of money really compensates for not having the badge of honour that comes with owning that and all the other things that went with it. 

Leaving to Zion was always the highlight, potentially thunderous, echoing with suffering and in the first place, at least, powered by Sly'n'Robbie, reggae's essential rhythm section and it's combative reply to disco's Chic Organisation. Pop music might have been an enormous industry but it can be narrowed down to a long short list of prolific musicians who were responsible for much of the best of it.

Romanticism

 For some odd reason I first thought I'd save this to send, along with any other suitable candidates, somewhere to see it in print. There was a time when that was quite exciting, imagining oneself the sort of 'poet' that some editor somewhere thinks worthy of publication and maybe a few readers will think worth reading.

I don't know what came over me. By now such things matter very little. I enjoyed doing it, like it and so it's over. It can be made public here for as many as know where to look immediately without the months of waiting to see if it gets in and then for the hard copy.

I almost miss the hard-won poem that takes a lot of thought and work. By now, it seems, as soon as the idea arrives, the poem can be done in short order. Being a poet takes me not very much time at all. The time it really takes is the long months in between ideas suggesting themselves during which it seems no more ever will.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Romanticism

The monks had done their homework and so knew
there was nothing left to say. Everything
expanded inwards, contemplating time
and space well beyond the giddy limit.
You’d never hear the last of it. 

Nineteenth-century Romantics, in love
with picturesque decay, resplendent at
the height of fashion, longing for whate’er
they longed for, postured here eloquently.
Such neat Regency graffiti engraved
into the masonry, like where it says
1811, is artwork by now.

Keats aboard his boat to Naples, restless
with tuberculosis, would have missed it
above where the sea continues sparkling
like a melancholy summer
trying to defy its end.

Netley Abbey 1/9/22

Getting over the Drina

 The Bridge over the Drina is an excellent book but what to call it is another matter. It's hardly a novel, being too episodic and the problem with historical fiction is differentiating between the history and the fiction. It is, of course, writing and that's all that matters.

The bridge itself might be many things. It endures, more than anything, a constant thing amid the coming and going of empires, rulers, conflict and the stories of individuals that gamble themselves away or jump off it. As such, maybe it is a stone symbol of something more stable and reliable than transient humanity but I'm sure the interpretation of the meaning of the bridge is a Ph. D. that's been done a few times.

First impressions of Ronald Firbank didn't do much to sell him to me so, with Banana Yoshimoto due any time I'll wait for her.

Looking forward to the Autumn season, mine is likely to be dominated by concerts in Chichester, Portsmouth and maybe Havant, Petersfield and Gosport which will be a most welcome return to that enjoyable routine.

Poetry might not be what it was but there is still Sean O'Brien whose Embark is due in November. Before that, though, Ian McEwan has Lessons,

Lessons is an intimate yet universal story of love, regret and a restless search for answers.
Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes, it says, which is a shame because a wife that mysteriously vanishes is what the novel I've tentatively made a new start on is all about. It shouldn't be a problem, though, because McEwan is likely to be excellent and mine will do well to get written beyond chapter 1, never mind get read, and so there should be no conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, as ever, poetry isn't over til it's over, as above.